What to do? What to do? I mean, they already beat this franchise into the ground, so they have to try to attract an audience somehow. It was never really compelling, but they followed the old Cannon film model of making a movie for a budget of nothing and then releasing it. If you make the movie for a small enough amount, you can't help but make money on it (or that is the way the thought process goes).
We do not follow our usual cast of characters. The woman and guy who made the first movie semi-entertaining are not the focal point, nor are their relatives (who dominated several of the subsequent films) or even neighbors, ancestors, or other people who might forward their storyline. Instead, we delve into the Latino community; I'm not sure if this is an attempt to pander to a specific audience or not. If it is, it doesn't come off all that well; it's like they wrote the parts for white people and then inserted Mexican stereotypes after the fact. The characters are all pretty shallow and difficult to sympathize with, and it seems to reflect the care that was given for the rest of the movie.
I would normally detail the characters and how well they were portrayed, but I'm not going to bother. They didn't bother to give me a decent movie to watch, so why give their names any more publicity than they should get? I'll admit that the dialog didn't help them at all, but the actors have to hold their own, and these did not.
I've had about enough of the "found footage" style movies in general. They are a cheap way to make a movie and not have to pay a decent cameraman, sound guy, or even a director who knows what he's doing. Unfortunately, they can really only tell one or two kinds of stories, and they don't tell them particularly well.
So, what new surprises did this movie bring? Well, Ouija boards are out of style, so they use a Simon (because no one knows how THAT technology works) to communicate with the spirits. Also, they have to step things up a notch by having full frontal nudity of a woman in some kind of trance. Aside from those two things, it's the same old, same old.
Story was tired
Cinematography was predictably abysmal
Acting was pretty bad
Dialog was terrible
Effects were mediocre
0.5/5